There is an increased demand for ways to reduce the number of bits needed for transferring or storing data in binary digital form. This demand exists, for example, in the telecommunications industry for storing digitally encoded speech off-line into memory such as for telephone answering and recording purposes. One way to reduce needed memory capacity for binary digital data storage is through data compression. Data compression involves reformatting a binary representation of the data, using some defined encoding scheme to re-represent the same data in some new, abbreviated way, using fewer bits. A measure of the effectiveness of such compression is the accuracy and completeness with which the new compressed re-representation can be used to reproduce the original representation, when needed.